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This spring, I’m working as a part-time UX design intern at Pegasystem’s Digital Team.
Two months have passed since my start day. So I wanted to take some time to share what I did, learned, and what to improve.
This is my first time working as a UX design intern in the US, so some of the thoughts may be limited to my own experience.
Last month, I wrote another self-reflection. So if you’re interested, feel free to give it a read!
If you’re interested in my journey to Pega, check out this article.
The second month was a heads-down work grind.
On top of school and life, I tried to make as much progress as I could with the design system.
Quite a lot has happened, so let’s dive right in.
At Pega, I’m recreating Pega’s Bolt design system from scratch in Figma.
Last month, the only major work I did was on the buttons.
So, in the second month, I picked up the pace. And now, I’ll share what I did.
And a quick heads-up:
Sorry if what I’m about to share is confusing to people. I just want to accurately capture my current progress.
This was a nice addition as it gave me a good overview of what I completed.
And what I need to work on... (check out all the gray tags 😅).
In all honesty, there’s no way I can finish everything by the end of April.
As my mentor and manager said, my role is to set a good foundation. So once that’s completed, I’ll try to create as many components as I can.
This is a work in progress. But I’m quite satisfied with the current structure.
Right now, this is how I’m structuring my layers:
This is the same structure as the Bolt design system documentation site. The yellow highlights are the major categories:
Before, I played around with other types of layer organization. But, I landed on the current one after I saw IBM’s Carbon Design System file on Figma.
Here, all the main components are stored in the major category file. For example, in my 02 - Elements file, this is what I have:
With this organization system, in the assets library, the components will be arranged neatly by their category.
If you’re still reading, you may ask:
Wait Guo, then what do you include on each sub-category page (e.g. buttons, icons, cards, etc)?
Great question. For each page, my goal will be to
Thus, the rule of thumb is:
Create the main components in the category pages. And then use the instances in the sub-category pages.
Now, let’s break down my work in each category.
💡 After writing a few first drafts, I realized that breaking down each element will take too much time. Thus, I’ll share screenshots of what I did.
I didn’t want to bore you out with the details. So if you have any questions about how I created these, feel free to reach out!
The week before spring break, I gave a design system demo to the design team.
In the end, I think it went quite well. And the team was happy with what I’ve accomplished so far!
One new addition in the second month is the design + code workshop with my mentor.
And I love it.
Right now, we’re building my design portfolio from scratch. And I’m learning SO much (front-end best practices, page structure, using math, scss, etc).
Honestly, this is so much more practical than the web programming college course I took (oops).
As usual, every week I called my mentor and manager.
But last week, I called two members on the design team (Aneesh and Matthew) separately to understand what they were up to.
It was great to hear what other designers are doing on the team. And both ended up as great conversations!
As mentioned before, I’m learning A LOT from the weekly design + code workshops.
Honestly, I should put more time outside of the workshop to practice front-end coding. And if possible, I can try to code my next design portfolio.
This made more sense after I learned how to create tokens in code.
In short, tokens can help you maintain a consistent style in your design system.
This stemmed from my conversation with Matthew, the Senior Brand Manager at Pega.
There were lots of insights packed into our 1-hour call. But here’s one that stuck with me:
As a designer, you will experience this one day: You spent so much time on a design, and it just ends up in the trash. How will you respond?
Matthew stresses that, in this case, you need to respond like a professional. For instance, you can say:
Thank you for your feedback. I will work on these.
Instead of saying:
YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT DESIGN! MY DESIGNS ARE GREAT!
Aha of course!
Right now, I’m writing this sentence on 3/29 at 12:17 AM. And I’m supposed to post this article on 3/29.
😅
Right now, there are a lot of things I’m juggling around. So I need to set my priorities and work on what’s important.
In the second month, I can confidently say that I spent a considerable amount of time building the design system. I’m proud of the work I’ve done for the team.
For the last month of the internship, I plan to create as many components as I can. And I want to spend more time reviewing the lessons I’ve learned from the design + code workshops.
Thank you for being awesome and reading this far! :)
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn, Twitter, or by email. Will love to set up a casual call and chat!